What is the I in ID?

jar,I'm gonna shoe horn my real interest into this discussion and I'll admit it's a bit of a leap. The sources of my interest lay in the sages of the east, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Ramana Maharshi.I'm fine with science. At this point science studies matter/energy and space/time. There are the beginnings of studies of "information" and that I remain virtually ignorant about. Antonio Damasio and other brain scientists are working on how consciousness emerges in the neural organization and function of the brain and I think that is very important essential work but I suspect that the buddhist concept of primordial consciousness will prevail as a recognition that all though the contents of consciousness require various structures, consciousness itself is a fundamental property of the universe.The mystery then is not out there. Science studies the out there very well. But who is it that knows that it is? The eastern sages, and to be specific I'll now take the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, point out that anything we point to as ourself is an object of consciousness and therefore can not be the subject that is aware of it. If I say I am a human, my human organism is an object of my awareness. The I as subject then is not a human that is just one of the things it is aware of. The mysteries are not out there in space or back there in time. We are the mystery as we contemplate the mysteries.In the west the duality of consciousness and the universe is most often taken for granted in religion, philosophy, and science. What Buddha, Ramana, even Bernadette Roberts in California speak about is their experience of themselves as separate individuals falling away, disappearing. Buddha means 'awake' and what we talk of in the west as enlightenment I feel is better understood by the translation of "awakening". With the loss of a subject there is loss of object. Roberts attempts to express her experience as, I paraphrase now to the best of my recall, 'An eye that seeing everywhere sees only itself'.Western religion has most often responded harshly but these experience are noted by the sufi's of Islam, a few christian contemplatives, and I don't know about Judaism.Official christians will most likely say this is the heresy of pantheism. I don't know if that is right or not. But my understanding of the experiences of these sages is that the universe is one whole interdependent phenomena and we are not separate. As fundamental as matter/energy and space/time are to this universe, the universe that you and I live in at this moment is even more fundamentally awareness itself. Ramana often called this Self with a capital 'S' to differentiate from the ego that we all have and that we feel is our individuality.Ramana in the indian tradition identified this as the Godhead, Brahman. Buddha declined to give an opinion on the existence of God, but in some school of Buddhism this might be spoken of as Mind, or the One Mind. Like vortices form in a rivers current we take on the appearance of individuality for awhile, but that is one of thousands of patterns formed by the water and in essence we are water, or rather we are awareness and not any of the object awarenss can identify itself with.I hope you find something of interest in this different view of the "I" in ID.peace,
lfen

Hi Sas,Is material itself material?
And what are entities?Take a star. An entity event of long duration that comes into being transforming energies of atom events into radiant energy and then the process subsides and changes and morphs into other processes.Remember any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo! ?? uh, er wait, no that would be is indistinguishable from magic.There is the universe in which it appears entities appear but those entities are transformations taking place. One of the key recognitions of the Buddha was that there was no permanent self. What we take as ourself is changing all the time. If entity is a concept that we've misunderstood and there are no entities in the sense of discreet beings then the concept of God as an entity is meaningless. Wittgenstein might say it's just an improper use of words that gave us the false impression that there was a question.On the other hand this gigantic process of the universe that we are part of, might that process qualify as God? Godding is the manifesting of that we call "What is".peace,
lfen

Crash,Thought of course references itself all the time, I agree with you on that. But I have trouble thinking of your computer programs as being aware, and in the same way I have trouble seeing thought as being aware. It makes distinctions, differential responses, even intelligent solutions, all these being neuro motor behaviours. But is that awareness? Is that the feeling of "I am"? Not the words but the essential feeling? It isn't for me.Here is one place where that which is closest to us is so hard to see. Mind, awareness, consciousness, self awareness can be used synonymously or can be used to make some distinctions. That too. Yes, the brilliant insight of Korzbski, "The map is not the territory". And yet do we know the territory at all? If thought is knowledge than all we know is the map. UG Krishnamurti is saying something like that. And if what we know is the map, that is our world so to speak, the world in which we move and function and think, then we are the map! The we or I being "ego". We don't know the territory at all. The territory is the unknown mystery. If the map disappears which means the ego disolves than we are the territory, the empty sage of Lao Tzu.Take your computer programs. They have maps, addresses, routine calls that is what they know and that is how they function and they reference that. But something is happening that they don't know about at all. Electron gates are functioning for example as well as devices. The programs don't understand or know anything about that, they just know data in registers. The mind is something like that. It doesn't have a clue what really is. It knows numbers, maps, concepts.lfen

Sas,Caught it, thanks!I loved your point about Darwin's Origins. But to be confessional for a moment, what I wish is that I could write 1/10 as good as Mark Twain. That guy had an amazing way with language. And some very biting satire on the religion of his time.Mostly I like to examine and open up a question until I end up scratching my head wondering what is it now that I'm looking at.I don't have the physics or math so I'm not using this as an analogy but just as a point of departure for musing, but it's the wavicle thing about light. Particles are kind of things, and waves aren't and photons can act like either. So someimes the universe looks like its particles and sometimes waves?On the other hand I have a special delight in the woman who stated, " it's turtles all the way down"! If nothing else that solution has it's own goofy elegance that makes me laugh and feel happy in a kinda zen humored way.peace,
lfen

Sas,I won't do the LOL thing which I think is often not the case, but this comment had me audibly chucking alone here in my study and I'm still grinning--designers all the way back indeed!But to focus on the I in ID. Intelligent, intelligence I'm thinking that word is too vague, or ambiguous, serves to many functions. And is saying Intelligent Design redundant? I mean I love redundancy it gives so much security. Someday I want to have a brass "Department of Redundancy Department" on my door.But I suspect this thread would it be better focused on whether it's designed or not first. Then if design can be established look at whether the design is intelligent or not.I mean to keep this simple isn't the crux of the argument whether the life, universe, and ???? is designed or evolved by random interactions? And only secondarily is the design to be evaluated for intelligence?peace,
lfen

quote:

---

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If thought is knowledge than all we know is the map.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

​

But thought isn't just knowledge.

​

Thought is perception and conception, too.

​

We construct thought in the brain, we don't "record and replay."

---

schraf,I'm just beginning to work my way into this. Of course the brain is not a simple recording device. But the thought that is constructed in the brain is knowledge. Writing is more like a recording of "thoughts" from the brain.I am working partly with the philosophical problem of qualia.We've got a physical/chemical model of the universe including humans.
For example photons of a certain freguency are absorded by a pigment in a retinal cell. The cell fires and there is a cascade of neural activity maybe, if say the photons are from the Red signal in a traffic light, leading to foot on brake. But back to the brain receiving information from the retina. We experience redness. Is that redness out there or in the brain or?Scientists study light. Now we have knowledge of our theory. But what is out there? Theory has the atoms being mostly empty. But we don't walk through walls. The walls we know are constructs. Can we ever know what a wall really is? Can we know what an atom really is?Would a computer hooked up to some sort of light sensor experience anything like our experience of "redness"? Would a computer referencing memory locations that store data on it current state experience anything like our "self awareness"?I think this is a very central and difficult problem. I just don't understand how the analogy of a self referencing computer explains how our brains, or existing organism functions in regards to consciousness. It may help understand certain neural functions, but not the consciousness that I am experiencing now as I sit and write this.What say you?peace,
lfen

quote:

---

i said it is true and i prooved that no one can write like it.
you claim that it is not , i asked you to write like 1/10 of it,but you did not answer .
you claimed and asked me to prove that your claiming is wrong.
what is your logic!!!!

---

dandon,You haven't grasped logic. Can you write like Charles Darwin? or Mark Twain? I can't. I know of no one who has. Even if that is true and how can we know that someone somewhere won't be able to write like Darwin, Twain, or Mohammed. How would that fact establish a source beyond human? It would only establish that it's impossible for one human to completely imitate the writing of another human.You have been conditioned by your experiences in your religion to emotional believe it. Because you emotionally believe it you want it to be factually and logical true. You want your shared cultural social fantasy of how the world is to be accepted as fact. This is true of all revealed religions.These same illogical and absurd emotional rhetorical claims are made for the Torah, the New Testament, The Book of Mormon, and trance channeling. Some partisan claim that demons are responsible for the books of other religions. This is all fantasy and nonsense. It goes on because of emotional conditioning stemming from a time when people had less knowledge of the universe and of themselves.Logically, Mohammed's brain made the Koran up, just like human brains made all the revealed books up. Logic doesn't mean illogical arguments to persuade emotional people to your point of view. It's much more precise than that.But continue your studies of science and take some courses in logic.peace,
lfen

quote:

---

however once your offspring develop a genetic disease cause you ate shrimp, clams, lobster, and all those other unclean creatures in exotic foods, don't blame God, cause he said these creatures are unclean to eat,

---

whatever,How does eating shrimp or any other "unclean" animal create a genetic disease? What is the specific mechanism? I was not aware that foods could mutate the DNA of sperm and ova.God said they were unclean? I've no idea where the idea came from or who wrote it down. It's in the bible so it was most likely a priest who came up with it. Seafood can spoil rapidly and particularly in this day and age water pollution and "red tides" can result in dangerous toxin levels in seafood. But then so can E.Colli in beef.peace,
lfen

quote:

---

improperly designed for our upright posture.

​

I'll ask the question again: Why would God design our spines to guarantee back problems

---

sas,We could maybe start a new thread on this? Until then I'll pass two authors on to you.John Sarno M.D, The MindBody Prescription
Moshe Feldenkrais Awareness through MovementAnd one brief personal testimonial. I've have had agonizing episodes of back spasm, tight back etc. At 57 my alignment and body sense is more comfortable than I can recall ever experiencing. The idea is that we learn poor body patterns in this society and we respond to stress in ways that physically pain us. Sarno shows studies, and there are several, that pain and strutural wear are independent. Yes there are painful conditions of the back but they are not nearly as common as stress and self usuage pain. If you want to discuss this start a new thread and I'll join you.I think evolution did an over all awesome job of "intelligently" evolving the human body.peace,
lfen